Food History

I’ve been watching Eurovision and have completely forgotten what I was going to post about tonight. I nearly gave you a food history vision of Eurovision instead, but decided that was pushing things a bit far.

It’s been a long time since I’ve given you an overview of a particular ingredient. In fact, it’s been such a long time you’ve probably forgotten I promised more. This means I need to be very sweet to make up for lapse. This can only mean sugar as the topic of the day. So here’s some stray information about sugar, in no coherent order.

Sugar maple is acer saccharum. Maple sugar is boiled down from the sap of the sugar maple, in autumn.

Sugarcane (saccharum officinarum) is that green stuff that grows on the side of the road in Northern NSW or Queensland, you know, the stuff that always used to be burning. Fresh sugarcane has a high water content and is squeezable by the very strong. This makes sugarcane juice a very sweet alternative to fruit juice in Singapore and other tropical places.

In less-interesting countries like Australia, people use the processed results to cook with. The white sugar we use is very processed sugar, as cane sugar naturally has a great amount of ‘other’ stuff in it, some of which gets marketed as molasses and some of which gets added back into the sugar to create blends such as ‘raw’ sugar, ‘brown’ sugar and demerara.

Beet sugar (produced in Europe) reaches its state of pristine whiteness much more easily. It comes (obviously) from beet(beta vulgaris). Beethoven was famous for growing up among them (“Beet hovenâ€? = “Beet fieldsâ€? - sorry, but it really was about time for a bad joke); related to the mangel wurzel which is such a resonant name I had to include it somewhere here. It is also related to Swiss chard which is the leafy bit, not the root. The classic beetroot soup is, of course, borscht. The cheat’s way of making borscht is with the juice from a tin of beets, a bit of shredded beet, and sour cream. And that’s your recipe for the day.

As far as I can find out, beet wasn’t a source of sugar until Napoleonic times. The story as told to me (which one day I do need to check out) was that all the main sources of sugar during the Napoleonic Wars were either controlled by Britain or blockaded by Britain and so Napoleon encouraged the development of a local source of sweetness. Why this needs checking is that the French had access to all the regions they governed, which included quite a bit of turf where sugarcane was grown in, say, the Middle Ages.

PS There are lots of other sources for sugar, but not today. Today all sugar is found in obvious palces. One such place is not the picture, which is of heritage carrots.